


Cross My Heart (No Turning Back)

by luninosity



Series: Reunion [2]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Established Relationship, Love, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Moving In Together, Relationship Discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 12:21:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1347292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In retrospect, Erik probably shouldn’t’ve proposed to Charles the same day they’d first met again after five years apart. But he couldn’t not ask. Like iron in his blood, like the heartbeat in his veins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cross My Heart (No Turning Back)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afrocurl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afrocurl/gifts).



> Title from the Foo Fighters’ “Walkin’ A Line.”
> 
> For afrocurl, who requested a sequel to [Believe (One More Time).](http://archiveofourown.org/works/907191) Sorry it took ages—this was actually kind of hard, because I’d never really envisioned a sequel; that one was fairly complete, in my head! But I like how it came out, I think.

In retrospect, Erik probably shouldn’t’ve proposed to Charles the same day they’d first met again after five years apart. But he couldn’t not ask. Like iron in his blood, like the heartbeat in his veins. Physically incapable of holding back those words, when he’d wanted to say them, would say them all over again, so profoundly.  
  
He’d say them again right now, if he had any sense that they’d help, that Charles might accept them. He wants to say them again.  
  
Like so many of his decisions, that one had been fuelled by a desperate mixture of fear and love and determination and anger, though that last one’s mostly self-directed, and just a bit directed at Sebastian Shaw. Sebastian’d tried to humiliate Charles on that day, at their class reunion, and even though that’d been resolved by Charles calmly verbally eviscerating the bastard and then kissing _Erik_ , Erik can’t entirely forgive said bastard.  
  
He’s finding it hard to forgive himself, also, at this moment.  
  
He looks at Charles, settled here under a hastily-gathered protective blanket on Erik’s expensive and uncomfortable leather couch. Charles, here to visit him for the weekend. Charles, here in Erik’s apartment.  
  
Charles, here where all the shelves’re too high and the floors’re too polished and the walk from the elevator’s too long, even though at least that bit’s carpeted. Erik lives in one of the most luxurious apartment buildings in Washington DC, as befits an advisor to the President on national commitments to science and engineering—and correspondingly a highly visible spokesperson for equal rights regarding the manifold expressions of human sexuality. Erik’s apartment’s ideally suited for quiet off-the-record meetings with senators, or for the basic functions of sleeping and eating, or for making black coffee in the mornings before he goes in to work.   
  
Erik’s apartment’s not at all suited for a fiancé who, though mostly out of the wheelchair on good days, walks slowly and carefully and can’t reach up to find a glass on one of those shelves or get properly comfortable amid smooth stylish leather sofa-cushions. Charles had slipped in the sleek modern shower, the first time he’d visited. He hadn’t called; Erik’d been at work, some Saturday-morning meeting he no longer recalls the purpose of, and had come home to find a trail of water-splashes leading from the bathroom to where Charles had collapsed across the bed, wearing only his towel and all but incoherent from the agony and the Vicodin.  
  
Erik can only imagine. Can only picture, and try not to picture, how much that must’ve _hurt_ , how fiercely brave Charles must’ve been, to get up—or, G-d, to _crawl_ —into the bedroom and find painkillers and then smile, sloppy and exhausted and drugged, when Erik came running down the hall after not hearing an answer to his greeting at the door…  
  
Charles had held his hand, and said, “It’s not your fault,” and fallen asleep. Erik, heart in his throat, had installed handrails and bought non-slip shower mats and living-room rugs and tried to figure out how to move all the cupboards in the kitchen, the same afternoon.  
  
Charles’s apartment back in New York exists as an improbable collision between a typical grad student’s lair, a fantastical wine cellar, and a physiotherapy clinic. Books and notes and forgotten teacups layer every available surface. Priceless bottles from the Xavier ancestral liquor cavern get pulled out for special occasions, or Friday nights. And everywhere Erik looks, there’s unmistakable concession to the fact that Charles is no longer the boy who’d been a star on the football—proper football, not the American version—team, who’d accompanied him on early-morning runs, who’d swung long legs over Erik’s hips, laughing, in bed.  
  
The shower’s designed to accommodate the wheelchair if necessary. All the furniture’s selected for support as well as cushioning. The upper cupboards and bookshelves remain empty. And there’s workout equipment, balls and weights and a miniature treadmill, scattered in unlikely places, for Charles to do all his exercises at home.   
  
Charles is diligent about those exercises. Treats his recovery with the same quiet focus and resolve he’s always given to his passions: academia, science, Erik. Erik’s in awe. Has been ever since that glorious and terrible and wonderful day at the reunion, six months and two days ago, the day Charles had kissed him and Erik had apologized and then proposed and Charles had said yes.  
  
That yes hangs in the silence, now.   
  
“I love you,” Erik says. “I’m—Charles, I’m sorry.” He is. It’s the little things. The things he doesn’t even think of, like the way that keeping the tea on a lower shelf might be fine but putting it in the back because _he_ doesn’t use it means that Charles, when showing up for a last-minute weekend visit, has to bend over and search.   
  
It hadn’t been a _surprise_ visit. His Saturday brunch fundraiser’d been rescheduled and Charles only has some student work to grade before Monday and had said on Thursday night, grinning across the Skype connection, _I’ll get on a plane in the morning, it’s my turn, see you soon!_  
  
He’d had enough time to move the tea. Hadn’t even crossed his mind to do so. At least, not until Charles had wandered out to the kitchen and gone looking for it. Erik, halfway through a biography of Malcolm X, had snapped out of the companionable reading-and-grading coziness and bolted for the kitchen, just in time to catch the tiny inadvertent sound as Charles straightened up.  
  
He’d got an arm under pain-tensed shoulders and walked Charles back to the sofa over Oxford-accented protests and grabbed the nearest fluffy blanket and tried despairingly to make amends, to make tea himself, to procure anything edible or literary or entertaining that blue eyes might desire. No, Charles had said. You don’t have to.   
  
Erik had felt his hands shake, at that. Had put them behind his back, standing there helplessly in front of the sofa and beloved blue eyes.  
  
“It’s really all right.” Charles stretches one leg, experimentally. Winces. It’s not a bad day, he’s upright, he’s marking quizzes and not even on painkillers. Just a day. Just an ordinary day.  
  
“It’s not all right. You—” He stops. Runs a hand through his hair. They’ve had this fight before. They have it every time Charles visits, lately. It’s familiar, that knife through his gut. Doesn’t make it hurt any less. Even more.  
  
They’ve been making it work. Long-distance and long engagement and no hurry, this time. They _have_ been making it work. But that knife twists anew, as Charles tucks the leg back under blanket-fluff with assistance from a hand.  
  
“Don’t say it’s all right,” Erik gets out, after too long a pause, trapped by the simple casualness of the gesture. One more stab wound. And Charles hasn’t even meant it to be. “It’s not. I forgot, I didn’t think, and you’re hurt.” Those words bruise the air. Too much history. Too much like the first time around.  
  
He’d proposed then too, all those years ago. Had been incandescently in love and defiant and ready to take on the world, himself and Charles against everything, lift the flag and win every battle and wave the swords, all to the cheering of triumphant drums.  
  
They’d never even talked about getting married. Erik had known, of course, that _he_ wanted to; Erik had always known, had had the vision in his head so very clearly, every snapshot of their lives brilliantly delineated and vivid in dreams…  
  
Charles had asked him to wait. To wait for those blue eyes to finish graduate school, to grow accustomed to the idea, to have _time_.  
  
Erik, furious and wounded and betrayed, had said words. And then Charles had said words. And then they’d walked away from each other for five interminable colorless years.  
  
He hadn’t thought, then. He’d known about Charles’s parents and their brittle façade of marriage. He’d known about Charles’s stepfather, and subsequent vicious scars and nights spent hiding in a closet. He just somehow had never applied the one to the other: of course _he_ wasn’t like that, of course their marriage wouldn’t be like that, of course he’d love Charles forever and keep Charles safe and proclaim their love to the world without fear of any consequences because they could handle it all, come what may…  
  
He’d been an idiot. He knows it, now. After five years and so many belated apologies and Charles nearly dying, a drunk driver and rain and a graduate student walking home late at night, and if Charles _had_ died Erik might’ve never known, because he’d thrown himself so blindly into his work, closing off any mention or thought of blue eyes at all; and that thought catches in his throat like a fishhook and chokes him every time, a vision of a future where he’d never be able to breathe again…  
  
And every time he _doesn’t_ think, every time Charles glances away and tells him it doesn’t matter, a little more air goes away, and Erik’s afraid that at some point he’ll start to inhale, unthinking, and find nothing left.  
  
“I’m not hurt.” Charles sighs. “Not more than usual, anyway. Erik, you can’t change your whole life around for me. New kitchen cabinets, canceled meetings—I know you skipped that policy review session to fly up for my lecture at last month’s symposium—you can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep doing this.”  
  
“We can,” Erik says, voice horrifyingly shaky. His voice is never shaky, not when he’s making recommendations to the President, to the National Science Foundation, to— “Charles, please. We can do anything. Us. Together. I’m sorry about your tea, I’m sorry—I won’t be sorry I wanted to be there for your lecture. Tell me what you need me to do.”  
  
Charles looks down. At the visible strip of cool stamped-concrete floor, grey and pale. The afternoon’s grey and pale, too. Lifeless. Hushed.  
  
Erik’s not sure what those so-blue eyes are seeing, as they refuse to lift. The couch-leg? The fluffy sapphire-colored rug he’d bought to cover nine-tenths of the living room, thick and plush and cushioned for bare feet or accidental G-d forbid actual falls?  
  
“You asked me to marry you,” Charles says, to the rug. “And I said yes.”  
  
“Yes—you’re not saying—you aren’t—are you saying we shouldn’t—” The sky’s cracked open. All the oxygen in the universe pouring out. None left in his lungs.  
  
“No!” Charles looks up, seems to realize how little that particular word helps, and actually reaches out and takes both of Erik’s hands. Squeezes. Firmly. “No. I said yes. I meant it. I told you I was tired of feeling afraid, of not letting myself want a future—I know what I want. I want you. I love you. I’ll say yes again if you ask me to. But something has to change.”  
  
“I can move.” He sits down on the precarious edge of the unfriendly sofa, uncertain how close Charles wants him to be, how much touching’s acceptable at this delicate and breakable second. Because Charles has offered them, he does rub his thumbs over the backs of those hands in his. Broad and freckled and sturdy and strong. “I can move to New York, telecommute, whatever you think—I know you hate this apartment, I know you still have half a year before you graduate, I know you’ve got a TA position and your place is—nicer—anyway—”  
  
“My place is _not_ nicer,” Charles says, laughing a little, though the eyes’re saying more complicated words. Wistfulness, relief, affection. Hope, perhaps, in all the infinite blue.  “Not even close. But I was thinking…I’ve been applying to positions out here. In DC. Faculty appointments. Fellowships. A couple of postdocs. I won’t hear back officially for quite a while, but I know some people, and they might let me know fairly soon…”  
  
“You,” Erik starts, and pauses. No words. Maybe some air, though. One last breath. Two. Reprieve, in the way they’re still holding hands, in that lake-country accent, in the expression in those eyes. “Out here? You’d want to…move…”  
  
“I was thinking _we_ could move.” Charles tips that head to one side, smiles, taps fingers over Erik’s skin. “You’re not wrong about me hating this place. Sorry. We could start looking for places now, and we’d have the time to really look properly, six months to find someplace we’d both love, and we can move as soon as I’m done…”  
  
“Yes,” Erik whispers. “Yes, Charles, I—you didn’t say anything, you never told me—”  
  
“Well, it’s all speculative, as I’ve only just finished the applications.” Charles bites his lip, flushes faintly pink. “I didn’t want to say anything until I knew. But…that’s not fair to you, either. I should be telling you. Whether or not it works out. We’re an us. And it’ll help—I mean, I’m never going to run a marathon, but I can stand and I can walk and I can make my own tea. I can get a job and move in with you. I’m not made of glass or porcelain or any other excessively fragile overused metaphor, and I think we both need to know that.”  
  
Erik echoes, “You want to move in with me,” because if he says it, if they both say it, the words might be real. “You—yes. I’m sorry, I’ll try, and you’ll try, and—you want to move in with me? Really?”  
  
“I want us to find a place together, that’ll work for both of us. And I want to get married to you in front of all our friends, and I want to walk down the aisle and find you at the end.” This time the smile’s even more true. Reflected, reflective, in ocean-water depths. “Some days I’m going to be in pain, and some days I’m going to be fine, and you and I both have to let me handle whichever sort of day it is, because if I can’t take a shower without you hovering around then I’m _not_ okay, and neither are you. But I will ask you for a massage when I could use one. If you wouldn’t mind.”  
  
“I’ll never mind giving you a massage,” Erik promises, breathless for an entirely different reason now. He ventures a hairsbreadth closer, on the couch. Sees the answering sparkle in all the oceans. “I’ll attempt to stop hovering outside your shower. Unless—if you’d like me to join you in the shower, sometimes…”  
  
“That might,” Charles decides, continuing to smile around the words, “be acceptable.”  And then leans forward and kisses him, one swift assured sweet meeting of lips. “You may also make the tea on the mornings I’m feeling lazy. And come to my lectures. _If_ you’re not skipping important running-the-country business to do so.”  
  
“Ninety percent agreed,” Erik says, “I really hate trying to explain science to the Vice-President, and yes, Charles, yes to us getting married and—is it all right if I meet you halfway and we end up walking together, because I don’t think I’ll be able to wait—I love you. Forever, completely, I love you, I love that you can walk down the aisle on your own. You can. If you want to. You _don’t_ need me. But I want to walk there with you. At your side.”  
  
“That,” Charles says, “that’s why I do need you, exactly that,” and kisses him again, tugging him down into the folds of the blanket, warm and excited and not fragile at all. “And yes. I want you at my side.”


End file.
